


that i only come home

by irnan



Series: mischiefmanaged!verse [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, mischiefmanaged!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-15
Updated: 2011-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-27 09:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>time enough now; time enough, and peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that i only come home

**Author's Note:**

> obligatory afterthewar!fic; title from Sheryl Crow

  
They don’t get back together immediately after the battle because Harry, contrary to popular  belief, is a mess, the whole world is a mess, and she’s just lost her brother and watched her Mum kill someone and thought he was dead and by the way, _lost her brother_ , so no, spending the summer snogging Harry Potter is not the thing that’s uppermost in her mind right now and yes, Mum, I knows he loves me, we do this thing sometimes where we open our mouths and speak to each other, so I know and you know and  Ron and Hermione know and Harry obviously knows and probably the giant sodding squid knows as well but the truth is, Harry is a chauvinistic arrogant selfish prat and I might have to put up with being patronised by every single member of this family except for Fred but I’m not going to be patronised by my boyfriend as well!

It’s a heartbeat before she realises what she’s just said and by then Mum is already crying. Ginny bolts out of the house and flies to George’s; he’s the only person she can really stand to be around right now and she’s fairly sure the feeling’s mutual.

They go to the Muggle cinema together and wander the streets of London hand in hand, silently.

*********

“It turns out the Godric’s Hollow house is still mine,” says Harry.

Hermione looks at him steadily. “The memorial –“

“It’s not the kind of memorial I want for them,” Harry says. They’re in his and Ron’s room, seated on opposite beds; Hermione and Ron are holding hands. “I want to – no. Look. You two – I keep telling you to go away and let me do stuff on my own, and you keep ignoring me, over and over and I guess this is... this is me admitting you’re right.” He clenches his hands, his scarred hands, on his knees. Who knew this would be so hard?

“I want to fix the house up. I want it to be mine, properly. I won’t go to Grimmauld Place, Sirius hated it there. And I wanted – would you come with me? Both of you?” Breath. Pause. Have to get the words right, these words above all others, second in importance only to the ones he’ll say to Ginny one day, when they’re both ready.

“Will you help me?”

His whole life blew apart when that house did, and he wants to put it back together again the same way: with two people beside him who mean the most to him in the world.

Ron laughs quietly. “Mate,” he says. “Of course we will.”

Hermione just nods, smiling.

(Harry’s never felt more like crying in his life.)

*********

They fix the house up. They garden and woodwork and charm; they move the memorial stone and the gate with its scrawled messages of (love) support to the back garden, under the oak tree.

They set up three bedrooms, only use one for the first six months and then graduate to two at Christmas.

They buy cutlery and crockery and furniture and carpets and rugs and a mirror that talks and a writing desk for homework and studying and whatever else. Harry won’t have a cupboard under the stairs – won’t have any space under the stairs – so they shut that up. They build a woodshed, because every back garden that’s as wild and large as theirs needs a woodshed. They Transfigure Harry’s Hogwarts trunk into a makeshift dining table and never realise it’s going to stay that way for twenty thirty fifty years

(until a green eyed boy named Jack accidentally Transfigures it back, to his father’s embarrassment and his grandparents’ amused exasperation and roars of laughter from his aunt and uncle)

Harry starts Auror training; Ron joins George in the joke shop, both of them quieter than Harry can ever really remember them being. Hermione and Ginny go to Hogwarts; between the four of them, the letters fly thick and fast. They learn to cook, more or less.

They heal.

*********

It’s October: clouds are scudding happily across the sky, wind in hair and robes. The sun breaks through and then fades again and the dry, bright leaves dance across the street, the garden, catching in hedgerows and fences and children’s hands.

It’s Halloween, and the house feels haunted.

It’s Hogsmeade weekend, and Harry Potter and Ron Weasley Apparate north. Hermione comes running down the path towards them, hair flying, and knocks into them both at once – they’re shouting and laughing and clinging to each other. She kisses Ron hard and ruffles Harry’s hair, grinning. She’s tired but delighted, and her hand in theirs, the weight and warmth of her between them as they walk to the village, is home.

Ginny’s in the Three Broomsticks. Madam Rosmerta hands out drinks by the bucketload to their corner table and informs Harry tearfully that they’re all on the house. He sits with his back to the room and listens to Gin, watches the way her hair moves and her mouth curves and her hands gesture. She talks about class and studying and arguing with her Mum; about Fred and George, about Quidditch, about Neville and Luna. He talks back to her: Auror training, life outside school, missing Hermione, last angle of their triptych. Missing her.

He takes her back to Godric’s Hollow, Side-Along for the first time, shows her the house. She wanders through the garden and rustles in the dead leaves, grinning. They kiss in the kitchen, and then move upstairs: to draw each other’s clothes off item by item, to kiss and touch and watch in awe, and Harry stretches out beside her in the narrow bed with the moonlight on the opposite wall and the wind in the corners of the house and tells her all the things he’s been waiting to tell her for months.

She says them back to him.

*********

Ginny wanders back into Hogwarts on the morning of the first of November pleasantly tired and aching in all the right ways: for Harry, from Harry. Oh, all right, so they were hopelessly awkward.

The first time.

Anyway, she knocks up Ab and meanders up the tunnel into the Room of Requirement and finally gets waylaid by McGonagall halfway up to Gryffindor Tower, who drags her off to her office for a lecture that makes her ears go red and gives her detention for a fortnight.

Two years ago, Hermione would have sent Harry a Howler for this.

Nev shakes his head at her, admiring the nerve of her. Luna asks her what she wants for a wedding gift – only partly in jest.

*********

“I’m going to spend New Year’s at Harry’s,” she says to Mum at Christmas.

Mrs Weasley gives her a look. “Are you.”

“Don’t worry, Mum, they’re all camping out in the same bloody bedroom.”

It’s a fib, but only since Hermione came home two days ago. Mum, naturally, looks as if the idea of all four of them in a room is worse than just Harry and Gin.

Oh well.

Crackers and laughter and shouting and George and Ron’s new products lying everywhere, tripping people up and blowing up alternately – there’s a spare chair in the corner till Ginny drags it over to the table and puts her feet up on it while she’s eating.

Dad has to leave the room and go cry, quietly, in the kitchen for a moment. Ginny doesn’t let up. She won’t let them treat Fred like some hallowed, untouchable memory; she wants his ghost close and mischievous and loving.

George grips her hand under the table, and she knows she’s doing right.

*********

She comes to Godric’s Hollow at Easter and finds Harry with Teddy, painting boiled eggs, it’s some strange Muggle tradition. Andromeda’s watching them bemusedly – but she’s also smiling.

Ginny talks Quidditch to her for an hour and a half and by the end of it they’re fast friends.

*********

The night Harry gets his Auror’s license he goes straight to the graveyard and his parents’ headstone.

“I know this is probably morbid,” he murmurs, fingertips brushing against the stone. “But I wanted you to know. I’ve just made Auror. I thought – I thought you’d be proud.”

(He asks McGonagall, just to be sure; she throws him out of her office for asking stupid questions.)

*********

Ginny turns up on his doorstep with her broom and a bag early one summer’s morning.

“Mum’s driving me mad,” she says. “Officially I am here to take refuge with my brother. Actually I’m here so I can snog you silly every chance we get.”

“I have absolutely no objections to that,” says Harry, and then proceeds to snog her silly on the front doorstep in the sunshine.


End file.
